Mosquitoes during Slahi's secret detention in Mauritania

Mosquitoes during Slahi's secret detention in Mauritania recur as part of the environment in which Mohamedou Ould Slahi was held, rather than as an isolated detail. In the Security Police building, they belonged to a neglected setting that made human presence seem out of place; later, they remained a constant in the room where Slahi and his guards ate, prayed, and listened to the news. Their persistence gives the detention a material scale: confinement was not only questioning and uncertainty, but also the repeated effort to rest and live within an unclean, uncomfortable space.

Setting and Conditions

Slahi describes arriving at the Security Police building after a roughly ten-minute drive. The building’s rooms were connected by holes, and its surroundings included a dirty floor and walls, an unclean toilet, ants, spiders, and flies. He presents the place as an environment particularly suited to mosquitoes, with people seeming like strangers within it. The insects are part of a wider description of neglect, not a separate incident with a clear beginning or end.

The room itself offered little relief. Slahi found a thin, worn mattress and lay down with his jacket over his face. He was exhausted and frightened, and the mosquitoes were among the conditions he endured as he tried to sleep. The contrast between the smallness of the room and the uncertainty of what awaited him gives the detail its narrative force: the immediate surroundings were concrete, while the possible future—further questioning, family intervention, or torture—remained unknown.

Waiting and Interrupted Rest

Slahi eventually fell asleep despite the mosquitoes, but his rest was repeatedly broken. On waking, he wondered why the guards did not simply interrogate him and bring the uncertainty to an end. His account connects the insects to the experience of waiting without suggesting they were the cause of his fear: he was already tired and terrified, and the prospect of questioning made even the intervals before it feel difficult to bear.

The same setting accompanies his attempt to maintain religious practice. He managed to perform his prayers, although he did not know how. That small act sits beside his account of exhaustion and uncertainty, showing the effort required to keep to a routine in a place where basic rest was unsettled. The mosquitoes remain part of the conditions around that effort, neither resolving the uncertainty nor allowing the room to become a refuge from it.

A Recurring Feature of Detention

The insects return in Slahi’s account after the initial arrival. When the Mauritanian State Security Directorate and an assistant leave him with the guards, he describes being left among the mosquitoes. Their recurrence makes the building’s environment feel continuous: the discomfort did not belong only to the first night or to the moment of entering the room, but remained part of detention as days passed and questioning continued.

During Ramadan, Slahi and the guards shared a large room without furniture. They ate at night, stayed awake for much of the night, and slept during the day; they also shared food and tea and listened to news on a radio receiver. Slahi again describes the mosquitoes as abundant. This account places them within a collective routine, alongside the guards’ expressions of sympathy and the unequal circumstances in which they lived. The insects did not erase the difference between guard and detainee, but they were part of a room both occupied, where ordinary activities continued under the constraints of custody.

Narrative Significance

The mosquitoes give Slahi’s account a recurring, physical measure of confinement. His detention appears not only through institutional actions—arrest, questioning, and uncertainty about where he might be sent—but through the conditions that persist between those actions. The insects are present while he waits, sleeps fitfully, prays, and later shares a room organized around Ramadan. That pattern lends the detail more weight than a passing description of discomfort: it marks the hours that otherwise have little outward change.

The account also keeps the setting specific. Slahi’s detention formed part of a longer route across countries, but the mosquitoes belong to his description of the Mauritanian rooms and shared sleeping space. They should not be treated as a feature of every place in that route. Within these scenes, their significance lies in the way they anchor the narrative in the repeated, everyday conditions of confinement, while Slahi’s attention moves between the room around him and the unresolved questions of what would happen next.